where he had hitherto resided, by gentleness and good temper, and seemed more attached to his native subjects than to foreigners; while Charlemagne was supposed to have disliked both the language and the people of France. From the suavity of his manners and kindness of his disposition, his subjects called him Louis Le Débonnaire, or the Good-natured; a name expressive of qualities valuable in private life, but not the best suited for the management of a powerful empire. 2. Two years after his accession he received the A. D. imperial crown from the hands of Pope Stephen V., 817. and soon after committed the greatest and most common error of the French sovereigns, by dividing the monarchy among his children; thus still more weakening an authority already much enfeebled by the folly of the government. He gave Aquitain to Pepin, Bavaria to Louis, and made Lothaire, the eldest of these princes, his partner in the empire. 3. Bernard, the nephew of Louis, enjoyed the crown of Italy as a fief of the empire; indignant at the elevation of Lothaire, he raised the standard of revolt, and broke out into open rebellion. Being abandoned by his troops, he was taken prisoner, tried, and condemned to death; but Louis commuted the punishment, and caused his eyes to be put out; three days after the young prince died. In order to prevent new troubles, the emperor shut up in a monastery three natural sons of Charlemagne, and compelled them to take the monastic vows. 4. After these acts of rigour, Louis became distracted with remorse; he reproached himself as the murderer of his nephew, and the tyrant of his brothers; these feelings were aggravated by the artifices of the clergy, who, at length, persuaded the king to accuse himself in a general assembly, and to solicit the prelates to admit him to public penance. Though the clergy pretended to be greatly edified by his proceedings, they saw how easily a man of such feeble understanding might be enslaved to their authority, and were not slow in taking advantage of the mistaken devotion which degraded the imperial majesty. 5. An opportunity soon presented itself; after the death of his first wife, Louis had been united to Judith, daughter of the count of Bavaria, and had by her a son who was afterwards king of France, under the name of Charles the Bald. As this child seemed to be excluded from the succession by the partition made in favour of the children of the first marriage, Louis was prevailed upon to make a new division, and obtain the consent of Lothaire, who was principally concerned to oppose it, and who soon found reason to lament his complaisance. A. D. 829. The three princes soon after formed a party to restore the original arrangement, and received effective aid from Vala, abbot of Corbie, who, though reputed a saint, did not scruple to put himself at the head of a faction. Prodigies were invented to inflame the credulous multitude, the most odious charges were brought against the government, and especially the empress was accused of having committed adultery with Count Bernard, a minister who had rendered himself odious by his stern inflexibility. 6. The weak-minded Louis humbled himself to the rebels, his empress was confined to a cloister, the king himself narrowly escaped a similar fate, and was compelled to publish a general amnesty, which only increased the insolence of the seditious. 7. The flames of this rebellion had scarcely been A. D. extinguished, when a multitude of errors kindled an- 832. other. Louis began once more to exercise the powers of a sovereign; he recalled Judith to court, when her ambition was exasperated by a thirst of vengeance; he banished Vala, regardless of the popularity which he had acquired by his pretensions to sanctity, and finally he disinherited his two sons Lothaire and Pepin, thus affording them a pretext for their unnatural hostility. He even made himself odious to his able minister, count Bernard, by giving himself up to the councils of a monk, who had unhappily gained his confidence. A. D. 8. Lothaire, Pepin, and Louis, assembled their troops in Alsace, and prepared to march against their 832. father and their sovereign. Pope Gregory IV. joined them under the pretence of acting as a mediator, but displayed all the zeal of a warm partizan, and threatened the weak monarch with the terrors of excommunication. Upon this several of the loyal prelates of France sent a spirited remonstrance to the pope, accusing him of treason to his sovereign, threatening him with excommunication for excommunication, and even with deposition, if he persevered in his rebellion. Agobard, bishop of Lyons, the most celebrated of the French prelates, refused to concur with his brethren, and joined with Vala and a monk named Ratbert, in asserting that the pope was invested with the authority of universal judge, and was amenable to no human tribunal. Gregory, acting on the principles of his supporters, replied to the remonstrance of the loyal prelates in terms of haughtiness, previously unparalleled, and asserted an authority which no pope had hitherto claimed. 9. The crafty Lothaire sent Gregory to propose terms of accommodation with Louis: it is not known what passed at the interview, but the consequences were destructive of the royal cause. By the intrigues of Gregory the monarch was suddenly deprived of all support, and obliged to surrender to his enemies at discretion. He was then deposed by a tumultuous assembly, and the empire conferred on his son; after which the pope returned to Rome. 10. In order to give permanency to this revolution, Ebbo, whom Louis had raised from a servile condition to the see of Rheims, proposed the following extraordinary and iniquitous method. "A penitent," he said, " ought to be excluded from holding any civil office! therefore a king who is a penitent must be incapable of governing; consequently, to subject Louis to penance, will for ever bar his way to the throne." The advice was acted upon, Louis was compelled to perform public penance in the monastery of St. Medard de Soissons, and after having signed a written confession, was stripped of his royal robes, clothed in the habit of a penitent, and immured in a cell; while Agobard was employed to write a vindication of all these horrors. A. D. 834. 11. But the prelates had proceeded too far; the cry of outraged nature and the voice of justice made a deep impression on the minds of the people; Lothaire became the object of universal detestation, and a new revolution restored Louis to his throne. His superstitious weakness became now more conspicuous than ever; he refused to resume the title of sovereign until he had received absolution, professed the most profound submission to Gregory, and, after a short suspension, restored Agobard to his former authority. 12. A repetition of the same faults naturally proA. D. duced the same misfortunes; on the death of his son 840. Pepin, Louis divided his dominions between Lothaire and Charles, to the exclusion of the Bavarian prince, who immediately had recourse to arms. While the emperor was on his march against this rebellious son, tortured with grief, and terrified by an eclipse of the sun which he deemed an evil omen, he fell sick in the neighbourhood of Mentz, where he expired in the twenty-eighth year of his reign. A provision for his favourite son Charles occupied his attention even in his last moments, and he bequeathed to him the provinces of Burgundy and Neustria, which was subsequently called Normandy. 13. During this reign the Saracens having subdued Sicily, infested the Tuscan Sea and threatened to make themselves masters of Italy; and in the mean time the Normans continued to ravage the coasts of Flanders and France. Thus with enemies on the north and south, discord, crime, and civil war raging within, Europe at this period presented a most lamentable picture; the misfortunes of France above all demand our attention, for its crimes were the greatest and its sufferings were the most severe. A. D. 14. A bad son will never make a good brother; scarcely had Lothaire been seated on the throne, when 841. he prepared to strip his brothers of their dominions. Louis and Charles, united by common interest, marched against their eldest brother, and defeated him at Fontenai in Burgundy. Few battles have been more bloody than this; historians differ as to the precise number of the slain, but all agree that the loss which France sustained in that fatal field, was one of the principal causes of the subsequent triumphs of the Norman invaders. 15. In order to procure the assistance of the Saxons, Lothaire had promised to suspend the laws of Charlemagne, which compelled them to observe the ordinances of Christianity; this afforded his brothers a pretence for endeavouring to procure his deposition. A numerous meeting of bishops was held at Aix-la-Chapelle, before whom the two princes preferred their complaint; and the bishops having examined the charge, pronounced that Lothaire had forfeited his right to the empire, which they assigned over to his brothers. This decree would have been observed to its full extent, had Lothaire been as ready to obey it as his brothers. But this prince was still formidable, and compelled his rivals to a new treaty of partition, subsequently confirmed at Mersen on the Maes, by which he retained most of his former dominions. 16. A few years after these transactions, Lothaire died; a little before his dissolution he commanded himself to be clothed in a monkish dress; a convenient piece of devotion, by which bad princes thought that their crimes might be expiated at the moment of death. His A. D. 855. dominions were divided among his sons; Louis had Italy with the title of emperor, Lothaire II. obtained that province which from him was called Lotharingia, and subsequently Lorraine, and Charles had the kingdom of Provence. Thus the empire of Charlemagne was divided into a number of petty states, the mutual jealousies of which were productive of constant bloodshed. The dominions of Charles the Bald were the most unfortunate of these states; governed by a prince who inherited the weakness of his father and the turbulent spirit of his mother, devastated by the Normans, who carried fire and sword to the very gates of Paris, and distracted by dissensions between the clergy and nobility, who, intent on their own petty jealousies, abandoned the state to its enemies. In this condition of affairs Charles was unable to make any resistance to the Normans, and when they sailed up the Seine to besiege Paris, he could only save the city by bribing them to retire; a course of proceeding which only made them the more eager to return. A. D. 17. The weakness of the successors of Charlehad stimulated the ambition of the popes to 862. magne, establish their authority over all the European monarchs, and an event which occurred about this time not a little contributed to their success. Lothaire II. king of Lorraine, divorced his wife Teutberga on a false charge of incest. She had first justified herself by the ordeal of boiling water, but was subsequently convicted on her own confession, if a declaration extorted by threats and brutal violence, can be called by that name. Lothaire then married his concubine Valdrada, and persuaded a council of bishops assembled at Aix-la-Chapelle, to sanction his proceedings. 18. The flagrant iniquity of this act in some degree justified the interference of the pope : it was perhaps his duty to have rebuked Lothaire, but Nicholas was resolved to bring him to trial. A council was assembled at Mentz which proceeded to examine into the affair, and, contrary to the universal expectation, it decided in favour of Lothaire. Nicholas deposed the bishops who had been most influential in procuring this decision, and sent a legate to threaten the king of Lorraine with prompt excommunication unless he recalled Teutberga. The intimidated monarch consented, and even gave up Valdrada to be taken as a prisoner to Rome. She however escaped on the road, and returning to Lorraine, was restored to her former honours; while Teutberga, wearied out by the contest, as |